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In 1525 the Scottish parliament faced a grave challenge. Alongside the usual business of governing – made more complicated by the presence of a thirteen-year old King champing at the bit for more power – a cold wind of worry was blowing in through the east coast ports. Parliament had heard that ‘damnable opinions of heresy are spread in diverse countries by the heretic [Martin] Luther and his disciples’. All, however, was not lost, since parliament believed that Scotland – just - remained ‘clean of all such filth and vice’. Keen to keep things this way, parliament banned heretical books or even discussing their contents. The only exception were university academics and students tasked with reading and discussing ‘to disprove them’.

The events of James V: Katherine take place in the immediate aftermath of that parliamentary act. Patrick Hamilton was, of course, exceptional – the first Scot to be burned alive for these new religious beliefs. However, his story also reveals strands which would be shared by those fighting religious battles over the following decades: the continental connections through his education in Paris and his brief self-imposed exile to Marburg just before his trial; the irony that the University of St Andrews – the very place tasked by Parliament with refuting heresy – became one of the locations where the books of Luther and other reformers found a ready and eager audience.

The fact that Patrick converted his family is also telling. The nascent movement for religious reform in Scotland was facilitated by personal connections – a wealthy landowner such as Patrick’s older brother could provide safety for a preacher here, or turn a blind eye to dangerous conversations there. Women were crucial to these networks, wives as the hinge between two families when they married, mothers having responsibility for the early steps their children took in faith. Although often less literate than their brothers, women acting as partners in family businesses, or sharing the responsibility of managing landed estates, needed to be able to read and write. In some cases, women were the curators of their family information networks and archives: exclusion from educational institutions did not prevent women from learning, reading, thinking and talking. The only account of Katherine Hamilton’s conversion and trial dates from nearly a century after the events it records and the author was writing an explicitly pro-Protestant text – yet, whether or not it was true in the details, the picture of an educated and articulate person, a person sufficiently dangerous to be worth prosecuting, accurately reflects the roles women could and did play at this time.  

Patrick’s influence on his siblings also helps us understand the urgency of this battle over what can seem like quite abstract and complex theological debates: put bluntly, no earthly suffering, however acute, could match the pain of eternal damnation, an existence in hell marked by constant physical torment and the total absence of God. Those who sought to preserve and challenge the status quo shared this same fear. Their understanding of how best to serve God, to worship and live a good life, profoundly differed, but both groups understood the terrible consequences for those who failed to grasp the correct way of living and wanted to save their fellow souls.

Looking through the other side of the mirror, this meant that, like the serpent in Eden who tempted Eve, who in turn tempted Adam, those who taught errors would damn other souls for eternity. In the paternalistic and highly structured society of sixteenth-century Scotland, political and spiritual leaders alike had a responsibility to protect the souls as well as the bodies of those whose duty it was to obey. It was their responsibility to root out any threats, including the moral and the spiritual, for the good of the whole. We are now, rightly, entirely horrified by the idea of burning someone alive for their beliefs. Sixteenth-century authorities did not take this action lightly either – it was a last resort to remove a threat to the country’s salvation.

Reflecting on this period from our five-hundred-years-later vantage point, it is tempting to see such drastic action as arising from a clash between two clear sides – Catholics versus Protestants. After all, when the reformers won, this was the history they wrote. Most famously, the misogynist preacher John Knox argued in his History of the Reformation that his opponents had been corrupt, engulfed by every moral failing imaginable and the lines between the two sides had always been clearly drawn. Discussing their opponents, Knox and his comrades employed the language of filth and vice which parliament had used to describe the reformers in the 1520s. Othering your opponents was a sensible strategy to keep the faithful safe.  

Looking at the records of the 1530s, when the events of the play take place, suggests a drastically different picture, characterised by a wide range of complex opinions on the state of the Church in Scotland, as well as the best ways to solve some of the problems it faced. Many, including senior clerics, wanted higher educational standards and better preaching in the parishes, others thought the wealth of the church should be directed towards these activities and charity towards the poor, not maintaining the lifestyle of senior prelates. There was widespread grumbling that clerics who had broken their vows of chastity were distracted from their duties and diverting the Church’s resources to their growing illegitimate families.

Yet, it was possible to make all these criticisms without wanting to completely dismantle an organisation which was deeply welded into the fabric of society and whose teachings offered not only promises of future salvation but whose practices provided immediate earthly comfort. Many grumblers would have been wary of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.   

The crown shared these dilemmas. In the parliament of 1540-1, for example, as well as passing legislation against heresy, James V ordered the clergy to improve their behaviour – to offer better spiritual support and keep higher moral standards in their personal lives. Having seen a play which criticised low clerical morality, James jokingly remarked to the Bishops who had also attended that if they did not improve their standards, he would send them down to his Uncle, Henry VIII of England, who by that time had broken with Rome and dissolved the monasteries. Yet, the same year, royal publications appeared featuring an image of Christ crucified designed to signal support for the Church, the King attended heresy trials and royal money facilitated executions.

Whilst we have far better source material surrounding what James V said and did than many of his subjects, this mixture of genuine belief with an ability to discern areas which required improvement, and a willingness to speak out on these, is a good reflection of how many must have felt. These nuanced debates surrounding the pre-Reformation Catholic church echo many of the ways in which we discuss the NHS today. We might want to see shorter waiting lists or distrust a particular medical professional, whilst still passionately believing in the principle that everyone equally deserves healthcare, and remaining very willing to contribute financially towards its upkeep.

Over the years that followed Patrick Hamilton’s execution, the arguments made by radical thinkers such as Patrick Hamilton combined with the drip-drip of books from abroad, and the social and economic turmoil of war with England, to gradually erode the deep-rooted trust of Scots in the faith of their ancestors. These gradual changes made possible the violent seizures of conflict in 1559-60 which we now call the ‘Scottish Reformation Rebellion’. One part of this process was the gradual hardening of lines, and flattening a complex situation characterised by shades of grey into a clear story of goodies and baddies, reformed and reprobate – to use the language of the time, the clean and the filthy. Stepping beyond this to the messy and complicated attitudes of the 1530s reveals a world of complex and febrile debates. Nevertheless, these coalesced around a perhaps surprising consensus: an agreement that reform of some sort was needed, informed by a shared understanding of the high prices at stake and the divinely ordained imperative to find the solution which would ensure salvation.   

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